The Three Sisters Sovereignty Project [Part 2]

[Read Part 1 of The Three Sisters Sovereignty Project blog post HERE]

Food sovereignty as a form of resiliency

Being from the Bear clan of the Mohawks, the medicine people, Tiffany Cook, whose Mohawk name, Katsitsienhawi, means “she who brings the flower,” felt that it was her ancestral mandate to help her people detoxify from the pollution of the superfund sites. She did this by starting to grow her own food indoors and using the water from her house dehumidifier to water the plants. “I first started making juices with groceries, but then I started growing my own food and that made a whole new difference”. She designed the Green Juice with the specific aim to expel the heavy metals from people’s bodies, which otherwise “slowly destroy your system”. Within months she was able to help people get off their medications and some of them were even able to transform their tumors to benign. Unfortunately, though, Tiffany’s daughter, Meadow, was still sick and asked Tiffany to move out of the reservation because if not, “she didn’t think she could make it”. 

This is when Tiffany came together with her sisters Fallan and Kaweniiosta, who had been feeling the desire to join forces and help their community. When the opportunity to move to West Fulton, NY, came thanks to Bethany Yarrow, owner of the Waterfall House, Tiffany and Meadow moved there and the idea of creating the Project came to life: the three sisters were going to bring the people back to their ancestral land, by creating a food and cultural sovereignty project. 

Why “The Three Sisters”?

The project is called “Three Sisters” because in the Mohawk harvesting tradition, the three sisters are the beans, the corn and the squash. These are all grown together as polyculture, not separately like in the monocultures prevailing in the Western cropping system. These foods have always been central to the nutrition of the Mohawk and represent communality as well as balance between the different genders in the tribe. “The corn shadows the squash on the ground when it’s hot outside, and the beans grow around the corn stalk as well,” told Kaweniiosta in the Y on Earth interview with Aaron Perry. During harvest ceremonies, the women join the men in a dance, where they circle around the men mimicking the same spirals that the beans make around the corn when they grow, symbolizing collaboration and unity. 

Roger Jock

Growing corn, especially traditional white corn from the Seneca territory, will be a very important achievement for this project, considering the colonial history behind it. As Roger described, when George Washington went through the Haudenosaunee territory, he ordered the burning of all of the corn crops, while the natives were taken away from their land. “When the people came back, they had to go and eat burned corn, and it was actually delicious,” exclaimed Roger. The burned white corn became a survival food, especially for the men: they would take a little bit, swallow it, then, in the stomach it would “pop” just like “popcorn” and it would make them full and give them energy to walk long distances across the country. 

A sustainable project all around: hempcrete for infrastructure

In terms of infrastructure, the Project will have a traditional Haudenosaunee longhouse, which is the sisters’ first goal. Traditionally, longhouses are infrastructures in which usually more than one family, if not a whole clan would live in. Usually, longhouses are built “with pole frames and elm bark covering” but for this project, the three sisters are planning to build it with hempcrete, thanks to a collaboration with Escher Design, Inc. an architectural firm based in Dorset, Vermont. According to Alex Escher, Director of Hemp Development at Escher Design, hempcrete has several benefits which will make the 3SSP Longhouse an example of more sustainable housing. “Hemp has the fastest CO2 to biomass conversion ratio found in nature, even more than agroforestry, as well as hempcrete, which also sequesters more CO2 than is emitted during its production. This process continues throughout the materials-curing process, which can take decades. Hempcrete is also fire, pest and mold resistant. A hempcrete wall system replaces the need for insulation, drywall and even siding. It also passively regulates the temperature of the building resulting in rooms that are cool in the summer and warm in the winter. This serves the dual purpose of filtering the air of VOC’s and other toxic compounds permeating in the room. This reduces the need for heating, cooling and expensive ventilation systems. Finally, hempcrete is made with no toxic compounds and requires minimal maintenance after implementation”. 

In addition to the longhouse, the project also foresees a cookhouse for women to use for ceremonies, where all the community can gather to share food. Finally, a language school will also be built, because the Mohawk language is “what connects them to the earth, the animals, the plans, this world and the other worlds,” as Kaweniiosta pointed out on the Y on Earth podcast episode. This will be another sign of resilience for the Mohawk tribe, since the Mohawks, just as the majority of the indigenous peoples around the world, have been forced by settlers to not speak their traditional languages, especially in Christian boarding schools. Thankfully, the three sisters claim that recently there has been an increase of fluent Mohawk speakers in the younger generation thanks to several programs that were developed by volunteers on the reservation.

The Three Sisters need your help to bring this project to life!

Kawweniiosta, Fallan and Tiffany standing at the waterfall on West Fulton, NY, the source of uncontaminated water which will provide to the food of the 3SSP. They are wearing traditional garments made by Kawweniiosta, another way of reclaiming their culture

Because of its fundamental mission, the Project needs your help. At the moment, the project is in the process of raising funding in order to buy more land, which will be used for the harvesting of food and for the building of the longhouse. If you want to contribute, please visit the Three Sister’s GoFundMe page to make your contribution. Even small contributions can make a difference. 

Three Sisters Sovereignty Project  is an example of a decolonizing project which shows the ultimate resiliency that indigenous communities have. The Project aims to cure the environment by implementing sustainable friendly hemp-design and traditional food harvesting techniques, while healing the bodies and minds of not only the people most affected by the nearby superfund sites, but also the non-Mohawk residents of West Fulton. This project is about communality, equality and resilience.

Story by: Ludovica Martella